I switched to Radicale and couldn't be happier, so lightweight no pain setting it up or updating. Supports CardDav for the addressbook and CalDav for calendar, tasks, notes.
Nextcloud is for Enterprises, not for selfhosting anymore.
this post was submitted on 27 Apr 2024
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Completely agree about Nextcloud. The project rose to fame on selfhosters beta testing it, then buddied up to enterprise users and ditched the initial user base.
What do you do for file syncing, if you don't mind me asking
Syncthing and I have it partitioned with:
- Music
- Documents
- Family Documents
- Password DB
So that I can decide what to sync to which device.Music is for example too big to sync to my Phone so I don't. Family documents I also share with my partner. Password DB I sync with all my devices but not to anyone else.
I use syncthing between my desktop and laptop for syncing all my documents, development environments and so on. Works well.
But how well does it work for sharing with someone else? E.g. it would be great to find a solution where myself and my partner could share notes and shopping lists which we can both edit. We use Google keep currently but I'm currently testing out solutions to de-google our lives. Nextcloud seemed like a good idea as it has docs and things but I've not found it very good to be honest. Especially syncing on a mobile. I've been using obsidian recently for my notes and it works well between laptop and desktop with the nextcloud app but I have to keep going into nextcloud on android to force it to sync or pick up new files. I'm just about to see how syncthing works for that but back to my original question..can you reliably have two people editing things with syncthing?
Joplin may ne good for you with notes
I went from NC --> Joplin --> Logseq
(With syncthing)
What Made you make the move from Joplin to Logseq (which I didn't even know of?)
Originally the ability to find specific files by name - Joplin was storing with filenames in(I forget exactly) date or serial number...
But, more importantly it was the dynamic bi-directional links that you can just type and creates a new page, and that page shows all the references pointing to it.
I use this for work, so each day's journal has meetings with subjects... go to that subject's page and there are all the meetings I had.
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Seafile has been great for me.
400gb, multiple users. Single sign in with Authentik.
Just recently setup only office integration
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Radicale has been so good I'd forgotton it existed, carddav and caldav sorted. Unix principle at its best, do one thing well (or microservices for the newbies). Why are you dogwhistling for a closed source marginal replacement for syncthing ?
Oh I also agree about Syncthing. With it you practically don't even need to run it on you server, I still do, just in case if all my other divices are offline.
I had similar requirements. I switched to Baikal, which has been happily running in a docker container ever since.
I've been hoping to find a non-PHP alternative to Nextcloud for a while, but unfortunately I've yet to find one which supports my base requirements for the file storage.
Due to some quirks with my setup, my backing storage consists of a mix of local folders, S3 buckets, SMB/SFTP mounts (with user credential login), and even an external WebDav server.
Nextcloud does manage such a thing phenomenally, while all the alternatives I've tested (including a Radicale backed by rclone mounts) tend to fall completely to pieces as soon as more than one storage backend ends up getting involved, especially when some of said backends need to be accessed with user-specific credentials.
Owncloud infinite scale is a rewrite of owncloud(=nextcloud) in go, it supports local, nfs and S3 mounts. Change the smb share to nfs and it might fit you
Disadvantages are:
- All the plugins need to be rewritten, so if you need some extra feature, it's going to be missing
- They got acquired by a company that sells an expensive alternative for corporations (RIP? Who is paying millions to maintain a free alternative/competitor?)
- Documentation is inferior, community is much smaller
I've been looking at the rewrite of Owncloud, but unfortunately I really do need either SMB or SFTP for one of the most critical storage mounts in my setup.
I don't particularly feel like giving Owncloud a win either, they've not been behaving in a particularly friendly manner for the community, and their track record with open core isn't particularly good, so I really don't want to end up with a decent product that then steadily mutilates itself to try and squeeze money out of me.
The Owncloud team actually had a stand at FOSDEM a couple of years back, right across from the Nextcloud team, and they really didn't give me much confidence in the project after chatting with them. I've since heard that they're apparently not going to be allowed to return again either, due to how poorly they handled it.
If you want to scale way down, Sabre develops the very lightweight Baïkal. I've been using it for a couple of years, and it's worked without a hitch. Just sits there and does its thing.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| DNS | Domain Name Service/System |
| HTTP | Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web |
| IP | Internet Protocol |
| SFTP | Secure File Transfer Protocol for encrypted file transfer, over SSH |
| SMB | Server Message Block protocol for file and printer sharing; Windows-native |
| SSH | Secure Shell for remote terminal access |
| SSO | Single Sign-On |
| nginx | Popular HTTP server |
6 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 5 acronyms.
[Thread #716 for this sub, first seen 27th Apr 2024, 08:35] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
Cloudron is kind of a freemium product. They offer a few apps (two ?) for free to use. For more apps you need to pay. Their back-end does have a view-source-but-no-edit "open source" license last time I checked. Bu if you want to keep things easy, go for it.
I just want an app to backup all the photos from my phone automatically. I use NextCloud for that currently and it works well. But, it's kinda heavy for what I want/need.
I solve this with immich too. Its a real game changer and agree with others that have indicated this as one of hthe best pieces of OSS.
have you heard about immich? it's a bit 'heavy', too, but that's because it's not just a photo backup solution but aims to be a self-hosted multi-user replacement for google photos.
Can Immich just leave my photos alone in their current location / folder structure, or does it take over and mangle it all up?
I'm fairly happy with my photo storage structure, but would like the features of Immich...
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Syncthing can backup your photos on Android.
I second that. I've been using it for a couple of years, syncing calendars and address book with both my PC and my Android smartphone (using DavX) and never had any problems.
I can recommend using Cloudron but I don't use Radicale.
Cloudron is in no way a necessity for anyone - it's simply me being too lazy to keep everything up to date, read all the necessary documentation for all the services we run,etc. Cloudron does all that for me - and I couldn't be happier. Johannes,the owner, provides fast support (had two glitches with Hetzner DNS over the years) and the amount of Apps is getting wider each year, although I would rather see their range be broader (e.g. a proper Monitoring system instead of yet another project management),but that's just me.
In theory it's even possible to create your own apps for cloudron, both for public and private use, but that is beyond my capabilities. It can also be used as a SSO provider and reverse proxy,btw.
There is no difference between installing software on a VM and on "bare metal". The OS takes care of the hardware stuff.
I installed it according to their manual on their website (https://radicale.org/v3.html) which is imo pretty easy. The TLDR is that you first install python3 and its package manager pipx, then you install radicale using pipx and finally you run it as a systemd service. You can just copy their service template. The issue comes when you need to run multiple web services though. Radicale wants to be on the website root (website.com/ instead of website.com/some/path/blablabla/ ) which is not as trivial to set up as the previous steps. They have a template for nginx and apache but you need to kinda know the very basics of one of these to set it up.
Also on debian there is a package so you could technically just apt install radicale and then systemctl enable radicale if you want to avoid creating a service and installing python.
Obviously you need to create a basic config either way according to their manual. At least for password authentification.
Running radicale on mydomain.blah/radicale just fine since day 0....
They didn't say it couldn't be done, just that it isn't the default way it sets itself up and requires more work.
My point was that it isn't as trivial but I suppose it is as long as you don't care about https and proper certificates. You can just copy their nginx/apache template if you don't.
OK, so seems like best way to install Radicals is on my Debian VM using apt. I wonder if anyone has compared Baikal to Radicale ...
I haven't tried Baikal but it seems to have (from the screenshots) just a bit more features. Radicale is merely the calendar+contacts+tasks server. You can login through the web UI to create calendars and delete them. They are then managed by a calendar/contact/task app like thunderbird. Baikal seems to have settings and a dashboard in the web UI which Radicale lacks.
Both seem to have an unofficial docker container if you're into that.
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I currently rent a VM running nextcloud for family use. It currently shows its age with all the nescessary tinkering to keep it current. (also have to use the hosters db which is .. difficult)
I'm thinking along the same lines...
a smallffpc at home, dyn to my home ip, wireguard as a vpn into my home, The server runs: radicale caldav carddav, ksmbd family photos.
my main problem: this needs to work on ios and android and linux and windows, reliably, which it currently does not in my test setup.
currently lacking a solution for recipe sharing and shopping list sharing. Maybe setting up nextcloud on my own server is less of a hassle_..
Home Assistant can do shared lists and (I've not used them) but has some recipe add-ons. There are apps for android and iOS. It can also take care of managing the dynamic IP. Then if you want to explore home automation in future you're ready to go.
Home Assistant was not on my radar. Thank you!
I have Linux with GNOME and Android and my partner has iOS and Windows and all the CalDav and CardDav stuff works fine. Or at least adressbook and calendar. I couldn't find a client for iOS for CalDav notes and tasks.
Same. The basic stuff works and i managed to replace recipes with nextcloud cookbook but its quite heavy caldav notes and tasks support on ios would be wonderful but i couldnt find something that integrates into our workflow and systems.
CalDAV note support is very rare on Android too. I think jtxBoard is the only app that does it and it needs DAVx5 to work.
It's a terrible pity, it would be great to be able to sync notes to CalDAV if you're using it for events and tasks and contacts but alas nobody seems interested.
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i have just started running radicale a lot more for calendars and contacts. then use betterbird for the client on my laptop and other android apps.
the problem is that there is no web-ui. otherwise, relatively solid and lightweight server so far.
From other responses to this thread it appears that Baikal does have a web UI so maybe it closes this gap?
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